Not really related to the article at hand, but I've been on a bit of a Google Maps binge the past couple weeks. I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them.
Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite view in Google Maps and look at various cities in China, you'll see that the road and business overlay is off by anywhere from 50m to 500m. And the strangest thing is that it's not a consistent offset from place to place.
Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a different geographic coordinate system than the rest of the world. WGS-84 is the most common coordinate system, but China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results. So applying any GCJ-02 coordinate to a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets distorted like a funhouse mirror.
It's easy to find open source libraries to convert WGS-84 to GCJ-02 and vice versa. But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I suppose? I've read that if you open Google Maps within China the mapping data is correct, but have no way to test that.
Nitpicky, but useful for anyone interested in spatial data: WGS-84 is not a "GPS standard" but rather a geographic coordinate system and is usually paired for consumption with a projection like wgs 84 web mercator to view those 3d coordinates on a 2d plane. Super interesting stuff and reconciling these standards across the globe is a really fun problem, and one you'll likely run into if you ever find yourself dabbling in remote sensing pipelines.
What I learned a few years back about this is the official (un)obfuscating implementation was distributed to licensed companies in binary .dll/.so/.a , and not allowed to be redistributed or reverse-engineered. Licenses are only given to local companies, and foreign companies may only buy service from them. That's why if you reverse engineer Google Map or Apple Map app, they all make real time API calls to do the conversion on servers. Those contracts may also limit the end user who can consume these APIs to be in China, hence foreign users will see the shifts of roads/etc.
The open-sourced implementation one may find on the internet are probably thru sth like curve fitting by sampling many data points. It may have good enough approximations but may not work one day if the gov agency decides to change the algorithm. Changing algorithm is a backward compatibility hell but not a big problem for the industry actually, because most Map apps are owned by big corp which has resource and motivation to comply.
It is fun to see such a discussion - I've been working on my own implementation of de-obfuscating Mars Coordinates since January 2021 with very good results. And Yes, some curve fitting is involved.
At the end of the day they may obfuscate coordinates and blur maps, but the truth will eventually come out.
My memory says that US government GPS at one point intentionally introduced reduction in accuracy/resolution as well, but they stopped, which was part of what led to the commercial GPS revolution (along with cheaper tech of course).
Let's see... Wikipedia seems to confirm:
> During the 1990s, GPS quality was degraded by the United States government in a program called "Selective Availability"; this was discontinued on May 1, 2000 by a law signed by President Bill Clinton.
This is different but related. China has no ability to influence GPS accuracy within its borders. What they do is manipulate all of the authoritative maps available so that GPS coordinates won’t map cleanly to the digital waypoints in the map. The GPS locations are very precise, they are just off by as much as a quarter mile in varying directions depending on where in the county you are.
When I was a civil engineer last century gps accuracy was an issue because people wanted to use gps for surveying. They came up with a system that would use 2 receivers and a radio between them to get much higher accuracies.
I've heard that just before Operation Desert Storm began in 1991 the reduced accuracy that affected civil GPS was temporarily turned off. This was a result of not being able to procure enough military grade GPS devices for army vehicles etc. If this is true it may also have had an effect on the decision to completely turn it off.
Circa 1999, I was a member of a search and rescue team through the explorer scouts. We got to carry milspec GPS devices on a hike once, because the forestry service wanted accurate maps of some trails. We were under strict orders not to deviate from the trail or tamper with the devices. Very fun cloak&dagger atmosphere for what was otherwise a lovely walk in a park. Hilarious that the need for such missions was obviated a few months later
Yes, when it first came out, it was a boon for cruising sailors such as myself who were using radio-based Loran up to that time. If I remember correctly, the civilian resolution was originally 50 meters, then lowered to 10 meters. I believe it is 1 meter today.
IIRC civil GPS chips won't work above a specific altitude or when moving above some speed limit. I think the idea was to prevent people from guiding missiles using those chips.
All Google products except the Google Translate App are blocked in China. So no Google maps.
I spent 2 months cycling China from Hong Kong to Beijing. Despite only using Chinese characters, Baidu maps worked very well for me. I copied the characters I needed (Hotel, supermarket) into it from the translator.
Regarding the “foreigners can’t stay here”, from what I know, this is because it requires extra work for hotels, they need to report your stay to the local police station, so usually smaller hotels, or the ones in non touristy cities just don’t do that. (And I believe that any tourist, needs to report their address to the local police station within a few days)
Two years ago when I saw Google car in front of me about to pass, I sure as hell opened the window and give it a bird, Maverick style. And sure as hell some 6 months later punching the address of my encounter, there I was in my car, with blurred face showing a middle finger that was surprisingly not blurred. So I showed it to all my friends all proud and stuff. Sadly a few months later the photo was replaced by I guess another drive-by. I imagine for many reasons since they already have a car in place, I'm sure they take few takes when passing by and someone must have reported me.
> Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a different geographic coordinate system than the rest of the world. WGS-84 is the most common coordinate system, but China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results. So applying any GCJ-02 coordinate to a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets distorted like a funhouse mirror.
A lot of countries use their own coordinate systems, that make their countries look flat on a x/y plane. Eg. my country - slovenia.
Usually those coordinate systems are easy to calculate to wgs84 or web mercator projection[0], compared to the chinese solution
Really silly question - but can't they correct for this without the GCJ-02 by just correlating the mutual of the map information with the satellite information? It seems like if you can have all the information provided to you, just randomly warped by some deliberate obfuscation you could 'trivially' (aka primitively) correct for it by using the available data of the satellite and the maps by feature matching and non-rigid registration?
edit: updated silly question after reading more on this
Neither. The satellite images are accurate, and so is your GPS readout. What's shifted is the official data that the government provides (eg. location of roads).
I wish I had saved some of the links I had found, one source I read said that the non-satellite map data was actually correct, and it was the stitching of the satellite imagery that was incorrect. I had no way to test this and no other source mentioned this, so I ignored it. But it's funny you mention this, #2 might be the case.
robotastronaut also corrected me that it's not actually the GPS that is being obfuscated, but the map coordinate system. So your GPS device is probably receiving correct results, but on an improperly projected map.
> I've found that the maps match the GPS of my phone exactly
I can use OpenStreetMap fine in China. But that's not Chinese data.
If a Chinese person sends me a location marker on WeChat, the marker will show up (for me, in WeChat) at some other, unintended, location; I can't use that feature at all.
South Korean on GMaps feel likes a snapshot of 2009. Whereas the rest of Google Maps has switched to something vector based, South Korea still has tiling based map images with different images for different zoom levels and the place names just baked into the image. Any idea why? Apple Maps is great in comparison.
Can confirm, the map in China is correct, but completely useless. Most addresses are not recognized or easily mistaken for other similar ones. Plus, the entire layer of business and POI listings that give GMaps its competitive edge are not there. It feels like using a foldable paper map.
> But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I suppose?
Or whoever is in charge of importing the data simply doesn’t know that different coordinate systems is a thing. You’d be surprised how many GIS professionals are oblivious to this, especially ones in charge of things that tend to spill large amounts of oil into the environment when they get it wrong: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/london-club-warni...
My understanding is that all agreements with Chinese map data providers require that map software implementors only display data projected into the "obfuscated" coordinate system, and the agreements forbid un-projecting back into "real world" WGS-84, regardless of how simple the algorithm is. So, it's more of a business agreement and less of a political thing, but with China there isn't much of a difference.
Tangentially related but where does this come from and why is it so widely repeated (as in this article):
> ...Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world
I've seen this claim (both in the "one of the most..." and "the #1 most..." forms) many times and I don't know where it comes from. What am I missing?
Here[0] wikipedia says Gaza Strip has ~5,046/sqkm. I thought maybe Gaza City was meant, it's density is 13,000/sqkm[1]. Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of cities by population density[2], and I haven't been able to find any "most populated places" lists that list anything below 15,000 people per square kilometer, which Gaza city is well below.
Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something? I hope it's me because if it's the former, that says something really bad about their fact checking and would suggest that BBC is not a reliable/trustworthy source, at least on this topic.
Where Gaza listed as its own country, it would be one of the densest, since it's basically a city and its urban sprawl and nothing more (like the other densest entries on the list). Of course, Gaza is itself arguably only part of Palestine, but the West Bank itself is pretty dense (see how high Palestine ranks on that list).
Looking at the country list, I see Israel is the #5 most densely populated country in the world. And Bnei Brak is the #5 most densely populated city, far more densely populated than Gaza. Bnei Brak was hit by rockets this week.
Can you link me to some articles that refer to "Hamas firing rockets on Bnei Brak, one of the most densely populated cities in the world"? Or "on israel, one of the most densely populated countries"?
If not, my question for you is: why do we see this phrase so commonly in reporting on Gaza but not on other more densely populated areas?
"Do you generally call things out as being untrustworthy for claiming that the top 5% is among the highest in a rank?"
The reason I consider this claim "misleading" is that I never see the "one of the most densely populated..." phrase on stories about Paris, Kathmandu, Seoul or any of the hundreds of more densely populated areas, yet I constantly see it in reference relatively much-less-densely-populated Gaza. When I start seeing news stories that read "The mayor of Hoboken NJ, one of the most densely populated areas of the world, opposes a measure that would increase affordable housing..." then the phrase won't make me scratch my head anymore.
Why does this phrase always come up in relation to Gaza and not the hundreds of other cities/regions that are more densely populated?
If we're trading references, can you show me some where the BBC refers to Paris as "one of the most densely populated places in the world?"
Articles citing articles citing articles... aka cliche. They're not really wrong. The definition of "place" is just arbitrary, so it's always "debatable.^"
Bnei Brak, incidentally, is also often described as the densest place in the world. It's just in other contexts that don't interest an international readership. It was mentioned often, in covid related contexts.
It must just be something that gets repeated without verification at this point. For comparison Gaza City has a slightly higher population density than NYC (but less than Hoboken, NJ) while the entire Gaza Strip has the same population density as Boston (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...).
> For comparison Gaza City has a slightly higher population density than NYC (but less than Hoboken, NJ) while the entire Gaza Strip has the same population density as Boston
Comparing Gaza to Boston is a bit misleading. Boston is closely integrated into an entire metro area, and the city limits of Boston are artifacts of history. Comparing to NYC is even less meaningful, because NYC is part of an integrated tri-state area and also the geographical center of a larger connected megopolis that contains 1/6th of the population of the entire US.
Gaza, on the other hand, is a strip of land the size of Queens (New York), and it is entirely cut off from everything around it (both land and sea). People who live in Gaza never leave, and nobody else enters. There's no "commuting" to or from Gaza.
It's maybe worth noting that objective metrics of population density are generally by land area and subjectively, density is about floor space or even volumetric. Building size could have a big impact on what is perceived as population dense.
> Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of cities by population density
> Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something?
What you're missing is that you don't have to be anywhere near that list to be one of the most densely populated places in the world. Most of the world is empty.
This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article is “Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?”... because the entire Israel / Gaza / West Bank region is blurred in the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of Palestinian areas. The clear answer is to prevent actors on both sides from using Google’s satellite imagery to plan attacks against one another. But please continue the breathless hot takes.
Israel can get all the detailed imagery it needs by just launching a reconnaissance aircraft or drone.
So on that basis I would say it only stops the Palestinians from getting imagery of the area.
Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.
Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the world from seeing what is going on.
I have learned to demand a very high standard of evidence for conspiracy theories, so...let's see the evidence that there is some conspiracy between Google and Israel to hide what is happening there. For that matter, I am not even sure what you think Israel is hiding -- Netanyahu is not at all shy about settlements, the IDF calls people up to tell them when a bomb is going to be dropped on their building, and there are reporters and international observers all over the Israel and the Palestinian territories.
It's why they target news agencies such as AP. Now you can't get pictures on the ground. So we all have to rely on is low resolution maps to judge damage. "Security measures", or so they say.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....
> Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the world from seeing what is going on.
No, not cynical. I will call it for what it is - baseless conspiracy.
There was a post about this last week where someone said the reason is to prevent the widespread confirmation of Israels nuclear program. Everybody knows they have nukes, but officially the US denies knowing.
These images would provide fairly strong evidence of Israel's capabilities, hell Israel has spent years trying to claim satellite images of Iran prove they have a nuclear program.
If that was the case why stop now? And why did they let parts unknown film in Palestine in 2013. The episode wasn't very pro Israel either. This a little to conspiracy theory for me.
I don't know the technical distinction between rockets and missiles. Hamas has some guided explosives that other people that know more about this than I do call missiles. They used to only have unguided rockets - not anymore, for at least 6 years.
"The Russian-made Kornet anti-tank guided missile, often called ATGM as an acronym, is accurate and effective. It has a range of around 5.5 kilometers and has been used by Hamas and other terrorist groups for years. In 2015, Hezbollah fired several ATGMs against Israeli Humvees on the border."
It would surprise me a lot if there were no people inside both Israel and Palestinians that has the resources and international connections to buy high resolution imagery or simply direct access to satellites. Given a few millions in capital and a few shell companies, finding a commercial entity willing to lend access to a satellite for a few hours seems likely, unless control over satellites are much more militarized than I might think.
IDF doesn't need Google maps to plan any attacks. They have an arsenal of remote surveillance methods including 24/7 monitering by both low and high altitude drones, not to mention frequent flyovers in upgraded F-16s.
You’re right, my last line was itself provocative and unhelpful. Unfortunately I’m unable to edit now. But my point is that what also doesn’t belong on HN are (a) a blatantly editorialized clickbait title and (b) a comment section full of knee-jerk reactions seeming to take the title at face value.
But to your point, indeed the IDF are not going to be planning their air strikes via google maps. The violent actors on the Palestinian side are more likely to “benefit” from publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel than vice versa. However as others have noted below, US law (kyl-bingaman amendment) apparently requires blurring of high-res imagery of Israel, so Israel was going to be blurred no matter what.
Which ironically brings us back to the question, why is Gaza blurred as well? Google doesn’t have to do that.
My initial assumption is laziness backed by armchair altruism. It’s easier to just apply a blanket blur policy to the entire Israel-Palestine region to comply with aforementioned KB amendment given the dynamic nature of the borders. Given that blurring is, at least at face value, considered a good thing for security, I could see the people in the room thinking “it’s easier for us and it increases the security of the entire region. We get ahead of any possible claim that google maps is enabling attacks on Palestine while protecting Israel. Problem solved.”.. without thinking through the potential negative externalities.
But as you’ve raised, blurring Palestine doesn’t meaningfully prevent planned attacks on Palestine, except if they’re carried out by rogue Israeli actors without state resources. In my understanding those are not as common. So then it raises the legitimate question, “does the negative externality of ‘preventing the world from easily accessing satellite imagery of Palestine and thus understanding the extent of urban destruction’ outweigh the positive benefit to general Palestinian security”? From an objective perspective, possibly, but from Google’s perspective, not blurring would be a much more politically charged move requiring nuanced explanation, so they’re not going to risk it.
In the end it’s very “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” much like every other aspect of the broader conflict.
Your opinion is a bit of wishful thinking when compared against policy reality and whose side has favor written in law.
As mentioned in the article, Israel specifically is protected --
"U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides that of Israel.":
This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article is “Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?”... because the entire Israel / Gaza / West Bank region is blurred in the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of Palestinian areas.
My fault - it was a hasty decision to correct what was (perceived) as an error (based on what was perhaps a faulty, because hasty, reading of the title earlier). There's a lot going on in that region at the moment, and a lot of news to catch up on - that's where the haste came from.
The clear answer is to prevent actors on both sides from using Google’s satellite imagery to plan attacks against one another.
I somehow doubt that the motive is as clear as you suppose - but that's an entirely different matter.
i am guessing that the israelis approach governments or corporations with the request to reduce the quality of imagery of israeli territory in order to hinder hamas' OSINT efforts, and include the caveat that gaza etc be blurred out as well to preserve the appearance of neutrality; obviously the israeli state has access to high quality imaging outside of google maps et al
Not really. The reason seems pretty straight forward to me, "The vast majority of Antarctica is also in low resolution due to the bright, often featureless, ice and snow making high-resolution imaging both difficult and largely unnecessary".
The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking days to image the whole planet. There are many of these satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible) governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane) imagery.
The net result is that updated-daily imagery exists, but real-time does not. While I'm not privy to the capabilities of the US military, the kind of real-time planet-wide surveillance that movies like Enemy of the State suggest doesn't exist planet-wide.
The highest-resolution images on e.g. Google Maps are from planes, rather than satellites, and aren't imaged anywhere near daily. The only way to have constant, real-time imaging of a fixed location is with a geostationary satellite, which will be so far away (22,000 miles) that the resolution will be low.
Given an unlimited budget, a huge constellation of hundreds or thousands of satellites could come close to real-time planet-wide imaging, but even then, you'd be getting views at different angles as various satellites took images, and you wouldn't ever have a clear directly-overhead view of people walking around.
I'm the founder of a company working to solve this exact problem. Revisit rate of Planet's 200+ Dove satellites are quite good (multiple/day) but are comparatively low-res compared to their Rapideye satellites, of which there are fewer. There are a slew of others (Maxar is the next biggest name that comes to mind) but the thesis is low earth orbit is getting crowded, satellites are incredibly expensive even with off-the-shelf parts and falling launch costs, and hardware capabilities are locked-in at launch.
We're taking the approach of using "free energy" in the form of 100,000+ daily commercial/freight/general aviation aircraft to crowdsource aerial imagery using mobile phones to start. Passengers who opt-in are rewarded with free in-flight wifi (where equipped), and we use the device to do orthorectification and photogrammetry at the edge before transmitting it back down via satellite internet. I'm glossing over much of the actual process, but this frees up a ton of computing that would otherwise have to be done on the ground. In the event the flight is not internet connected, we cache previous images based on flight path and upload the difference after comparing old vs. new on the device once signal is restored. End result is a massive boost in both temporal and spatial resolution at a dramatically lower cost. Think Google Maps, updated every few minutes.
We're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in looking at some samples.
Starlink is seeking approval for tens of thousands of low-earth-orbit satellites. Each one will have high-bandwidth network connections. It doesn't seem intractable to put cameras on each one and stitch their feeds together for imagery that's maximum 30 minutes old for any arbitrary point on the globe.
And the market for near-real-time imagery might be even larger than the market for internet connectivity.
There are also surveillance blimps, which I believe would be closest to a real-time feed. Some can apparently stay up for 30 days at a time. These have been tested for domestic intelligence, and radar (rather than optical) systems have been deployed overseas.
And even with such a budget: geostationary satellites over the poles are not possible[1] and really hard anywhere but over the equator, really.
So that means most of the south and north part of the earth cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even harder, because it would require an enormously complex choreography to ensure there's at least one satellite covering each square meter, at all times.
Since you know what you're talking about. Say I'm willing to accept the updated-daily or even weekly high-res imagery of the whole planet. Any idea what the cost would boil down to? How many parties are involved?
What limits the field of view of these LEO satellites? Why can we not have high resolution images of wider swaths? Is it something like the number of "receptors" on an imaging cell, or would wider angle lenses significantly distort the imagery?
Obviously different to optical images. But I wonder if this kind of live view would be more possible with SAR at higher orbits. And with enough signal processing may actually be more useful for automated analysis than cloudy images.
A fleet of drones that stay airborne can provide real-time feeds of a regional battlespace for military use. Cheaper, lower latency, higher quality data - but vulnerable to enemy airpower.
It seems like the answer is actually yes, then? Seems like it would be expensive but that is no issue with this thought experiment. OP didn't require High-res or directly-overhead, some caveats you added which constrain the problem more. But either way, it totally seems possible.
Heck, put up 100,000 satellites and use the same kind of tech Apple/Google/MS use in their 3D views of cities (it, they do take airplane and satellite photos at various angles, and use software to stitch together the separate pieces).
Seems totally possible to meet OP's request given money not being an issue.
It's up to date zoomed out, but zoomed in seems to be similar to what google maps provides. The picture of the area I live is the same 10 year old picture on google maps, complete with a house that hasn't existed in almost as much time.
One other thing to add - the Earth is really pretty cloudy. If you care about the clouds, new geostationary satellites are pretty good - (e.g. https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/).
Rough numbers, back of envelope calculation:
500 trillion square meters on earth * 50 pixels per square meter * 3 byte pixel depth = 75 petabytes uncompressed. Assume 90% image compression and remove the 71% of earth that is oceans and you're down to a little over 2PB.
Even for emergencies like flooding where it is very important to know which areas are flooded and which are not, I think presently there is no satellite based system which can give this information anywhere near realtime with anything close to the required resolution. So in the absence of such I assume the information will have to be gathered from ground reports and areal surveys, which I would think will be extremely time consuming and labour intensive to gather and collate and form a full picture of the flooding.
Even the biggest of floods is a localized problem. A fleet of drones can give you live feeds of the entire thing. The caveat is of course the military has the best ones, and there's an uneasy balance of allowing military use on home soil.
planet.com can get you a ~12 images per day [1] for a reasonable price. If cost really isn't an issue, I'm confident you could strike a deal with planet.com to place their next few new satellites into the specific orbit you want to up the frequency even more.
It's only medium-range and only updated once daily, with some missing spots due to the coverage of satellite tracks, but there are hundreds of different data layers which can be really interesting to explore.
Think of each pixel. If you want 1m resolution, you need at least one pixel for every meter of the planet. And, satellites can't be told to stay over land only. So, how many satellites do you need in your constellation to keep a 1s refresh time?
The earth is 200 million miles^2 surface area.
So, no. I sorta remember 4 day refresh at 3m resolution was the "wish I could get to" goal.
Which the article indicates, at least as it relates to the US and her companies, is no longer the case:
> In July 2020, the KBA was dropped, and now the US government allows American companies to provide far higher-quality images of the region (so that objects the size of a person can be readily picked out).
Technical issues apart , there are whole host of privacy issues with that kind of data. Stalking, theft to national security problems.
Imagine if there is real time /continuous feed of your house, it would be very easy to know when you are there and not by just looking for cars parked in the driveway.
Maybe Starlink satellites should also feature a camera? They've already got the connectivity. You'd need a large constellation and this one seems like it will become huge.
At 1 px/m², the Earth's surface is 5×10^14 pixels, so with the full constellation of 10,000 satellites and 1 fps that'd be 5×10^10 pixels/satellite/second (about a terabit/satellite/second uncompressed). If you can shoot 30 images per second, you'd need a 1.6 gigapixel camera.
They could do something like Sentinel's 10m/px, but looking at those images [1] I don't see the advantage of updating that more often than the once every few days we already have from Sentinel.
To make near-realtime interesting you need something closer to 1m/px where you can clearly make out cars. But at that point the optics and camera take more mass than a normal star link satellite. They would become earth observation satellites with an internet uplink, not the other way around.
Not really feasible at a usable resolution. The number of satellites required to do this as well as the data bandwidth needed far exceeds our current capacity.
>- Yes, see how they took a position on the heart of this issue — the occupied territories themselves. They literally erased Palestine from the map.
The US government doesn't recognize Palestine. Therefore displaying the occupied territories as a distinct state would be the more politicalized option compared with displaying them as they currently do. Either way, it just goes to show that the idea of a company being apolitical becomes more difficult as it grows and eventually becomes impossible when you reach Google's size. There is no potential choice here that isn't going to be viewed politically.
Well, you actually don't know the facts. Palestine is a land, it was called that way even when the time of the British mandate, before WWII. Are the arabs that lived there are Palestinians? Yes. But what you don't mention is that also the jews that lived there were called Palestinians. The land of Israel and Palestine are exactly the same thing. There are arab Palestinians and jew Palestinians. They were not so smart to not take the UN partition plan for Palestine, which the jews accepted. So, right now the entire land is part of Israel :)
Here's an explanation of past Israel prime minister Golda Meir, which has a statue in Manhattan. https://youtu.be/lhjB9W8UEgk
Not sure about sides here but if you launch rockets into cities indiscriminately and then the building where you keep your weapons, communication center using human shields after warning residents well ahead of time that the building will be blown up, actually gets taken out who is at fault here?
Why are people even defending Hamas???!
Does Israel not have right to defend itself? Is Israel like South Korea who gets attacked regularly and does nothing and opens itself up escalating levels of attack?
Readit News
Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite view in Google Maps and look at various cities in China, you'll see that the road and business overlay is off by anywhere from 50m to 500m. And the strangest thing is that it's not a consistent offset from place to place.
Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a different geographic coordinate system than the rest of the world. WGS-84 is the most common coordinate system, but China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results. So applying any GCJ-02 coordinate to a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets distorted like a funhouse mirror.
It's easy to find open source libraries to convert WGS-84 to GCJ-02 and vice versa. But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I suppose? I've read that if you open Google Maps within China the mapping data is correct, but have no way to test that.
The open-sourced implementation one may find on the internet are probably thru sth like curve fitting by sampling many data points. It may have good enough approximations but may not work one day if the gov agency decides to change the algorithm. Changing algorithm is a backward compatibility hell but not a big problem for the industry actually, because most Map apps are owned by big corp which has resource and motivation to comply.
Such irony in CCP using licensing to protect their IP
At the end of the day they may obfuscate coordinates and blur maps, but the truth will eventually come out.
Can't imagine why anyone would want that to happen.....
Let's see... Wikipedia seems to confirm:
> During the 1990s, GPS quality was degraded by the United States government in a program called "Selective Availability"; this was discontinued on May 1, 2000 by a law signed by President Bill Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/natureofgeoinfo/book/export/...
I think the US Government can also shut it off at a moments notice.
I spent 2 months cycling China from Hong Kong to Beijing. Despite only using Chinese characters, Baidu maps worked very well for me. I copied the characters I needed (Hotel, supermarket) into it from the translator.
Here's my journal https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/5000years
https://goo.gl/maps/kJdgWQUU3eUMReUE8
https://ibb.co/x18fy3s
A lot of countries use their own coordinate systems, that make their countries look flat on a x/y plane. Eg. my country - slovenia.
Usually those coordinate systems are easy to calculate to wgs84 or web mercator projection[0], compared to the chinese solution
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection
edit: updated silly question after reading more on this
Does that mean: 1) My GPS module also gives out obfuscated coordinates when in China or 2) Google uses shifted satellite images?
more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964450
robotastronaut also corrected me that it's not actually the GPS that is being obfuscated, but the map coordinate system. So your GPS device is probably receiving correct results, but on an improperly projected map.
I can use OpenStreetMap fine in China. But that's not Chinese data.
If a Chinese person sends me a location marker on WeChat, the marker will show up (for me, in WeChat) at some other, unintended, location; I can't use that feature at all.
Yes, Israel specifically has favor from the US government that satellite imagery of that country is allowed to be blurred:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment....
Or whoever is in charge of importing the data simply doesn’t know that different coordinate systems is a thing. You’d be surprised how many GIS professionals are oblivious to this, especially ones in charge of things that tend to spill large amounts of oil into the environment when they get it wrong: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/london-club-warni...
https://goo.gl/maps/oDwCuGhxxZVSj7nJ6 Hong Kong/China border bridges
Why would a space agency use a coordinate system to obfuscate results on another planet?
FYI: Google has never really quit China. It has running offices in Beijing, Foshan, and, recently, Shenzhen.
> ...Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world
I've seen this claim (both in the "one of the most..." and "the #1 most..." forms) many times and I don't know where it comes from. What am I missing?
Here[0] wikipedia says Gaza Strip has ~5,046/sqkm. I thought maybe Gaza City was meant, it's density is 13,000/sqkm[1]. Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of cities by population density[2], and I haven't been able to find any "most populated places" lists that list anything below 15,000 people per square kilometer, which Gaza city is well below.
Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something? I hope it's me because if it's the former, that says something really bad about their fact checking and would suggest that BBC is not a reliable/trustworthy source, at least on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Where Gaza listed as its own country, it would be one of the densest, since it's basically a city and its urban sprawl and nothing more (like the other densest entries on the list). Of course, Gaza is itself arguably only part of Palestine, but the West Bank itself is pretty dense (see how high Palestine ranks on that list).
Can you link me to some articles that refer to "Hamas firing rockets on Bnei Brak, one of the most densely populated cities in the world"? Or "on israel, one of the most densely populated countries"?
If not, my question for you is: why do we see this phrase so commonly in reporting on Gaza but not on other more densely populated areas?
It's basically after Singapore and Hong-Kong.
There are well over 10,000 cities in the world and Gaza City is likely among the top 500 for population density, which would put it in the top 5%.
Do you generally call things out as being untrustworthy for claiming that the top 5% is among the highest in a rank?
"Do you generally call things out as being untrustworthy for claiming that the top 5% is among the highest in a rank?"
The reason I consider this claim "misleading" is that I never see the "one of the most densely populated..." phrase on stories about Paris, Kathmandu, Seoul or any of the hundreds of more densely populated areas, yet I constantly see it in reference relatively much-less-densely-populated Gaza. When I start seeing news stories that read "The mayor of Hoboken NJ, one of the most densely populated areas of the world, opposes a measure that would increase affordable housing..." then the phrase won't make me scratch my head anymore.
Why does this phrase always come up in relation to Gaza and not the hundreds of other cities/regions that are more densely populated?
If we're trading references, can you show me some where the BBC refers to Paris as "one of the most densely populated places in the world?"
Bnei Brak, incidentally, is also often described as the densest place in the world. It's just in other contexts that don't interest an international readership. It was mentioned often, in covid related contexts.
^Meaning, pointlessly debateable.
Comparing Gaza to Boston is a bit misleading. Boston is closely integrated into an entire metro area, and the city limits of Boston are artifacts of history. Comparing to NYC is even less meaningful, because NYC is part of an integrated tri-state area and also the geographical center of a larger connected megopolis that contains 1/6th of the population of the entire US.
Gaza, on the other hand, is a strip of land the size of Queens (New York), and it is entirely cut off from everything around it (both land and sea). People who live in Gaza never leave, and nobody else enters. There's no "commuting" to or from Gaza.
> Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something?
What you're missing is that you don't have to be anywhere near that list to be one of the most densely populated places in the world. Most of the world is empty.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
So on that basis I would say it only stops the Palestinians from getting imagery of the area.
Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.
Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the world from seeing what is going on.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....
No, not cynical. I will call it for what it is - baseless conspiracy.
A high resolution image would be very useful to anyone who is planning a terror attack with suicide bombers, for example.
These images would provide fairly strong evidence of Israel's capabilities, hell Israel has spent years trying to claim satellite images of Iran prove they have a nuclear program.
"The Russian-made Kornet anti-tank guided missile, often called ATGM as an acronym, is accurate and effective. It has a range of around 5.5 kilometers and has been used by Hamas and other terrorist groups for years. In 2015, Hezbollah fired several ATGMs against Israeli Humvees on the border."
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/what-do-hamas-an...
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/why-anti-tank-missiles-pos...
> "As a result of recent changes to US regulations, the imagery of Israel and Gaza is being provided at 40cm resolution," Maxar said in a statement.
> But please continue the breathless hot takes.
This part of your comment doesn't belong on HN.
But to your point, indeed the IDF are not going to be planning their air strikes via google maps. The violent actors on the Palestinian side are more likely to “benefit” from publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel than vice versa. However as others have noted below, US law (kyl-bingaman amendment) apparently requires blurring of high-res imagery of Israel, so Israel was going to be blurred no matter what.
Which ironically brings us back to the question, why is Gaza blurred as well? Google doesn’t have to do that.
My initial assumption is laziness backed by armchair altruism. It’s easier to just apply a blanket blur policy to the entire Israel-Palestine region to comply with aforementioned KB amendment given the dynamic nature of the borders. Given that blurring is, at least at face value, considered a good thing for security, I could see the people in the room thinking “it’s easier for us and it increases the security of the entire region. We get ahead of any possible claim that google maps is enabling attacks on Palestine while protecting Israel. Problem solved.”.. without thinking through the potential negative externalities.
But as you’ve raised, blurring Palestine doesn’t meaningfully prevent planned attacks on Palestine, except if they’re carried out by rogue Israeli actors without state resources. In my understanding those are not as common. So then it raises the legitimate question, “does the negative externality of ‘preventing the world from easily accessing satellite imagery of Palestine and thus understanding the extent of urban destruction’ outweigh the positive benefit to general Palestinian security”? From an objective perspective, possibly, but from Google’s perspective, not blurring would be a much more politically charged move requiring nuanced explanation, so they’re not going to risk it.
In the end it’s very “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” much like every other aspect of the broader conflict.
As mentioned in the article, Israel specifically is protected -- "U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides that of Israel.":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment....
My fault - it was a hasty decision to correct what was (perceived) as an error (based on what was perhaps a faulty, because hasty, reading of the title earlier). There's a lot going on in that region at the moment, and a lot of news to catch up on - that's where the haste came from.
The clear answer is to prevent actors on both sides from using Google’s satellite imagery to plan attacks against one another.
I somehow doubt that the motive is as clear as you suppose - but that's an entirely different matter.
Here's a French prison blurred out on Google Maps, but uncensored on Yandex:
https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Prison+%22La+Sant%C3%A9%22/...
https://yandex.com/maps/org/tyurma_sante/117105575064/?l=sat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
The net result is that updated-daily imagery exists, but real-time does not. While I'm not privy to the capabilities of the US military, the kind of real-time planet-wide surveillance that movies like Enemy of the State suggest doesn't exist planet-wide.
The highest-resolution images on e.g. Google Maps are from planes, rather than satellites, and aren't imaged anywhere near daily. The only way to have constant, real-time imaging of a fixed location is with a geostationary satellite, which will be so far away (22,000 miles) that the resolution will be low.
Given an unlimited budget, a huge constellation of hundreds or thousands of satellites could come close to real-time planet-wide imaging, but even then, you'd be getting views at different angles as various satellites took images, and you wouldn't ever have a clear directly-overhead view of people walking around.
We're taking the approach of using "free energy" in the form of 100,000+ daily commercial/freight/general aviation aircraft to crowdsource aerial imagery using mobile phones to start. Passengers who opt-in are rewarded with free in-flight wifi (where equipped), and we use the device to do orthorectification and photogrammetry at the edge before transmitting it back down via satellite internet. I'm glossing over much of the actual process, but this frees up a ton of computing that would otherwise have to be done on the ground. In the event the flight is not internet connected, we cache previous images based on flight path and upload the difference after comparing old vs. new on the device once signal is restored. End result is a massive boost in both temporal and spatial resolution at a dramatically lower cost. Think Google Maps, updated every few minutes.
We're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in looking at some samples.
And the market for near-real-time imagery might be even larger than the market for internet connectivity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/blimplike...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System
So that means most of the south and north part of the earth cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even harder, because it would require an enormously complex choreography to ensure there's at least one satellite covering each square meter, at all times.
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71582/is-it-poss...
Just wanting to learn more about this.
Deleted Comment
The resolution and angles for your point of interest will change but you should be able to keep a near-constant coverage.
Heck, put up 100,000 satellites and use the same kind of tech Apple/Google/MS use in their 3D views of cities (it, they do take airplane and satellite photos at various angles, and use software to stitch together the separate pieces).
Seems totally possible to meet OP's request given money not being an issue.
not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from last year.
edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud coverage though
It's up to date zoomed out, but zoomed in seems to be similar to what google maps provides. The picture of the area I live is the same 10 year old picture on google maps, complete with a house that hasn't existed in almost as much time.
(planet customer, no other affiliation)
thank you company, I'm gladly calling to check your services now
If you care about the surface, a lot of places are really cloudy, including some that are cloudy basically all the time - https://www.cloudsandclimate.com/blog/where_is_cloudiest_par...
from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4BQ1XzwDg
from 4 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRa-AucbN6k
makes you think what they're doing today
Baltimore has been leading the charge on aerial surveillance: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-aerial-p...
[1]: https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/, as of June 2020.
Or, anyone who buys satellite images?
I know about real estate, navigation, and I've heard that some business use them to forecast retail sales.
I curious about other uses.
It's only medium-range and only updated once daily, with some missing spots due to the coverage of satellite tracks, but there are hundreds of different data layers which can be really interesting to explore.
The earth is 200 million miles^2 surface area.
So, no. I sorta remember 4 day refresh at 3m resolution was the "wish I could get to" goal.
> In July 2020, the KBA was dropped, and now the US government allows American companies to provide far higher-quality images of the region (so that objects the size of a person can be readily picked out).
Imagine if there is real time /continuous feed of your house, it would be very easy to know when you are there and not by just looking for cars parked in the driveway.
Controlling access would be quite challenging.
It's technically possible but not feasible.
To make near-realtime interesting you need something closer to 1m/px where you can clearly make out cars. But at that point the optics and camera take more mass than a normal star link satellite. They would become earth observation satellites with an internet uplink, not the other way around.
1: https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/
- Does Google deliberatly blurring Gaza strip?
- Who benefits by artificially degraded quality of Gaza maps?
- Does Google quietly taking political sides?
- Israel.
- Yes, see how they took a position on the heart of this issue — the occupied territories themselves. They literally erased Palestine from the map.
The US government doesn't recognize Palestine. Therefore displaying the occupied territories as a distinct state would be the more politicalized option compared with displaying them as they currently do. Either way, it just goes to show that the idea of a company being apolitical becomes more difficult as it grows and eventually becomes impossible when you reach Google's size. There is no potential choice here that isn't going to be viewed politically.
Dead Comment
Why are people even defending Hamas???!
Does Israel not have right to defend itself? Is Israel like South Korea who gets attacked regularly and does nothing and opens itself up escalating levels of attack?
What you said is plainly obvious.
If US mainland were ever attacked, no one here would object to a similar response.